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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
The largest and longest-established Asian American community Chinese numbers in America have also grown rapidly since 1965 through immigration from Taiwan, Hong Kong, overseas Chinese settlements and the People’s Republic of China. Chinese Americans have become a socalled “model minority” in terms of success in education, business and even sports. Yet, as political scandals and espionage accusations made clear in the 1990s, their “Americanness” was quickly called into question as a reflection of international relations as well as stereotypes of difference.
Like other immigrants in nineteenth-century America, Chinese American lives originally centered on involuntary ethnic enclaves (“Chinatowns”). Facing slurs, physical abuses and legal restrictions on immigration and citizenship, these ghettos became refuges for predominantly “bachelor” societies, where the male to female ratio reached 27:1 in 1890. Generally from Guangdong, in southern China, these Toisan/Cantonese laborers established complex “towns” with shops and living quarters.
Many associations flourished, replacing the traditional familial support left behind in China. The only non-Chinese in Chinatowns were missionaries and police; for outsiders, these enclaves epitomized urban mystery and danger.
As Chinese immigration developed, Chinatowns were also transformed. Secondgeneration Chinese Americans became citizens and formed new organizations, such as the Chinese American Citizen Alliance, to express their voices. China-towns declined in numbers and vitality in the 1930s, while adapting to American tourism and tastes.
Abolition of the Chinese Exclusion Act (1943), the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (1949) and the 1965 repeal of the 105 person quota imposed on China have all spurred growth of the Chinese American population in numbers and diversity Chinatowns still provide familiar surroundings for those with little knowledge of American culture. Many low-skilled workers find jobs in ethnic restaurants and sweatshops; with scant knowledge of their rights, they face exploitation by employers.
The importance of traditional groups has declined with integration and government social agencies like the Chinatown Planning Council in New York City, NY Some Chinatowns also face gang activities (imputed to Vietnamese or Fukienese immigrants), aging populations and clashes with other encroaching urban groups.
At the same time, Chinese communities have left the inner city for outlying places like Flushing (Queens, New York), Greater Los Angeles, CA or Sunbelt cities. These new suburban enclaves incorporate diverse Chinese in landscapes dotted with Asian malls and restaurants. Other Chinese immigrants and their children have adapted quickly to suburban dispersion and rapid assimilation through education and business, sometimes alarming other ethnic groups.
In politics, Chinese Americans have built slowly on the citizenship allowed them after the Second World War and their new numbers. While Democrat Michael Woo ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Los Angeles, and conservative Matt Fong was defeated in his bid for the governorship of California in 1998, Democrat Gary Locke was elected governor of Washington state that same year. Yet the actions of Chinese outside of the US—a tense area of foreign policy—have had an impact on political citizenship. Under Clinton, fundraising scandals connected with the People’s Republic and Taiwan tarred the civic image of American Chinese. China’s access to American nuclear secrets, examined in the 1999 Cox report, seemed to question the actions and connections of all Chinese Americans.
The public face of Chinese as Americans suffers from decades of orientalization, from D.W. Griffith’s 1919 Broken Blossoms to the 1960s Broadway musical/film Flower Drum Song. Since the 1960s, Chinese American film-makers, dramatists, novelists and academics have tackled these stereotypes in works by Wayne Wang, Frank Chin, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan and Gish Jen. Such authors explore the complexities of Chinese American history and intertwine them with other American ethnicities.
Industry:Culture
The right to control information, access and visibility is perceived as an important cultural value in the United States, closely linked to individualism and freedom. While debated in relation to public actions and rights to knowledge claimed by governments and social institutions like schools, issues of privacy also permeate the family where individual social spaces (separate bedrooms and control of information by children without informing parents) are also important to family dynamics. Privacy also shapes interpersonal relations in terms of topics commonly discussed and avoided—one may be warned not to bring up money or religion in social gatherings, while business interviews face strict limits on information that may not be asked (marital status, criminal history not directly relevant to the position, religion, etc.). Questions of privacy in the information age have become especially important with regards to the data gathered by bureaucracies and corporations and how these data are shared and used.
Rights to privacy have been worked out in complex ways throughout American history Provisions of the Bill of Rights testify to the rights to protect the home from quartering troops (3rd Amendment), unreasonable search and seizure (4th Amendment) and rights to protect the individual from testifying against him or herself (5th Amendment). Provisions dealing with freedom and gun ownership also establish private rights, while dealing with the extension of private beliefs and action into public forums. In the twentieth century Supreme Court decisions extended federal rights to the states. The right to privacy has also been evoked in court cases that have protected birth control, abortion (Roe v. Wade, 1973) and euthanasia; it has been argued less successfully in areas such as pornography and sexuality (especially when rights of children are called into play). These issues are also continually debated in issues ranging from police rights to use materials “in plain sight” to control of garbage.
Nonetheless, many Americans feel that their privacy has been threatened in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries by records gathered and kept by schools, governments (Internal Rev-enue as well as FBI), medical providers and corporations.
Storage and access to such records through computers and the Internet, as well as the permeability of electronic communication have increased tension. Corporate mergers also raise questions of data flows within multipurpose businesses. There is often a strong ambivalence, too, in these areas as surveillance technologies have become accepted to control crime, yet are challenged when they extend into private spaces (changing rooms, bathrooms) or even control of activity in public spaces (private choices to participate in public events).
Specific laws have been enacted to safeguard medical records and credit materials, but violations of these expectations are constantly revealed by media. The turmoil of legal cases involving the Clinton White House has also heightened questions about the private lives of public persons, as well as the ability of the powerful to have access to records that are presumed to be confidential. One striking index of public sensitivity to these issues has been the reluctance of many to complete questions of the 2000 census, including Republican politicians speaking out against this legally established duty.
Mass media have heightened sensitivity to the manipulation of private data as well.
Often, this is the stuff of crime novels, programs and movies, although these issues may be equally apparent in medical dramas. The impact of the potential manipulation of private information also underscores dystopic visions like The Net (1995).
Industry:Culture
Ubiquitous chain that began as a music and jeans store in San Francisco, CA in 1969.
GAP took on a more designer look with Mickey Drexler in 1983, when it also purchased Banana Republic. While it targets baby boomer infants and children with simple designs and interchangeable components, its primary market remains teenagers and twenty-somethings looking for cool clothes and even the transition to adulthood with GAP ties and coats. This appeal has made the company notable for well-designed (and globally copied) advertising campaigns featuring celebrities and ordinary teenagers launching fashion trends like khakis and vests.
Industry:Culture
Specialists in materials, tools and advice for the home-owner interested in small do-ityourself projects. Everything from nails to hand tools can be purchased, as well as lumber, paint and many other items. An outgrowth of the small-town general store of the nineteenth century hardware stores have been an integral part of rural areas, providing mail-order services for seed, fertilizer and livestock. Recently hardware stores have taken on an almost boutique status among young professionals. Individually owned hardware stores have decreased in the last twenty years due to the growth of retail chain megastores offering highvolume sales of numerous items.
Industry:Culture
State capital and Midwestern commercial center, known for conservative Republican politics and top-flight basketball (high school, college tournaments and the professional Pacers). While the 1990 population was 741,950, the city has grown through a notable downtown revitalization as well as its strong foundations in agriculture, pharmaceuticals and services; the metropolitan population for 2020 is projected at 1,770,525. In addition to many museums and cultural institutions, it also hosts one of America’s most famous automobile races—the Indianapolis 500.
Industry:Culture
The term “American Indian” refers to the indigenous people of North America. Neither the term nor the concept existed before Columbus landed in the Americas. Before European contact, indigenous people living in the Americas thought of themselves not as members of one large group, but rather as members of separate and distinct political units. Both a member of the Iroquois League (in New York State) and a member of the Passamaguady (a New England group) would have been amused by the idea that they had a common culture. Their societies differed as much as German does from Italian society. European settlers coined this collective term because they did not recognize or understand the differences among the indigenous groups. As first the colonies—and later the United States—grew, the tendency to see American Indian groups as homogenous and interchangeable intensified.
The US government often constructed American Indian policy without regard for the distinctive needs of a specific American Indian group’s history or culture. For example, in the middle to the late nineteenth century, federal policy was designed to force American Indians onto reservations. Although the policy was universally applied, each American Indian group responded differently to reservation life. The reservation experience was more disruptive to the nomadic Lakota (Sioux) groups of the Great Plains than it was to the sedentary Pueblos of the Southwest.
Despite the official lack of recognition of tribal distinctiveness, these differences and identities have survived among the nearly 2 million American Indians (1,959,000 according to the 1990 US census). Even today when American Indians from different reservations meet, the first question asked is usually: “What tribe are you from?” The answer is a specific tribe, and may include the more specific information of clan affiliation. Clans, the basic unit of American Indian tribes, are large interrelated familial and communal groups. This familial structure contrasts with the nuclear-family structure of mainstream American society. Some clans are patrilineal with membership descending through the father, while others are matrilineal with membership descending through the mother. Clan membership is determined at birth and only rarely altered through adoption. In traditional American Indian society a person’s primary allegiance is to the clan, and this forms the basis of a communal, clan-based identity. Because traditional American Indians consider marriage within clans to be incest, one parent does not share clan members with his or her biological children. This system tends to strengthen extended patrilineal or matrilineal bonds, while weakening those of the nuclear family.
Most American Indians still retain tribal and clan identities today. The communal nature of this identity has often been in conflict with mainstream society and governmental policy. Official attempts to undermine the communal clan identity began in colonial New England with the establishment of Praying Towns. Missionaries designed and oversaw these villages where American Indians could live away from their tribes in a European family structure and ultimately assimilate into European culture. The missionaries believed that in order to convert American Indians to Christianity it was first necessary for them to abandon their clan identities to develop an individual relationship with God.
Official attempts to weaken the communal nature of American Indian identity have continued into the twenty-first century. The goal of the federal government’s policy of relocation in the 1950s was the destruction of the communal identity and the clan system.
American Indian nuclear families were moved from reservations to major cities in order to assimilate them into mainstream society. To discourage them from returning to their reservations, the nuclear families were moved as far as possible from their tribes. Despite these precautions about one-third of relocated families returned to their reservations within a year.
Even among the two-thirds of American Indians who stayed in the cities, the urban experience did not eliminate the communal identity The social conditions that American Indians faced in these cities reinforced their communal identity Many of these urban immigrants found themselves unemployed or in low-paying jobs because their reservation-based skills were often useless in the urban job market. Their lack of marketable skills plus the racism they experienced forced them to congregate in crowded, poor neighborhoods. American Indian communities developed in relocation cities like Chicago, IL and Minneapolis, MN, where these neighborhoods became known as “Red Ghettos.” The American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in one such neighborhood in Minneapolis. AIM taught that the tribes had survived because they were communal in nature. AIM’s revitalization movement of the 1960s and 1970s created a renewed sense of pride in tribal culture. The current demand by many American Indian tribes for increased sovereignty has its roots in the revitalization movement fostered by AIM.
Demand for sovereignty manifests itself in different ways among different tribes. For example, many tribes are currently suing states for acknowledgement of off-reservation hunting and fishing rights. Many states held tribal members to local hunting and fishing laws despite treaties guaranteeing these rights. American Indian tribes in the state of Washington were the first tribes to challenge the state’s jurisdiction over American Indian hunting and fishing. In 1974 federal District Court Judge George Boldt ruled that tribes in Washington had retained the right to hunt, fish and gather on the lands they had previously owned. The crux of the fishing rights controversy was communal identity versus individual rights. The tribes argued that the fishing rights, guaranteed in the treaties, belonged communally to the tribe. These rights could not be sold, abrogated or exercised by individual tribal members, but only by the tribes as a whole. The Washington experience inspired other tribes to challenge state authority over them. The Ojibwa of Wisconsin have also insisted that off-reservation hunting and fishing rights are collectively held. Many tribes believe that the collective exercise of treaty rights and the maintenance of a communal identity are essential to their continued survival.
Industry:Culture
The quintessential American sport, shoved aside by football in the 1960s and the popularity of basketball in the 1980s, is now enjoying a renaissance in the early twentyfirst century. It is the stuff of American dreams, the sport of literature and of the pastoral life. Its birth is shrouded in conflicting claims, but popular myth and effective marketing have placed it before the Civil War, in Cooperstown, New York, a small village redolent of America’s literary past and the Main Street ideal, on which the hallowed Hall of Fame recounts the sacred story Football was largely associated with and still remains central to college life, not becoming a successful national professional sport until the advent of national broadcast television; neither did basketball, with urban roots that have remained its vital core. But baseball, the oldest of these three nineteenth-century inventions, developed by 1845 into a regular form, the “national pastime,” was a profitable professional sport within the first generation of its appearance.
The major leagues, a term that effectively reduced its competitors to minor league and dependent status, trace their roots to 1875 when the National Association of Professional Baseball Players formed in 1871, and, controlled by the players, was replaced by the owner-dominated National League of Professional Baseball Clubs (NL). The second of the two major leagues, the American League (AL), emerged in 1900. From 1903 to 1953 both consisted of eight teams that played 154 games a year. A season-ending contest, the World Series, played continuously for ninety years until the owners canceled it during a labor dispute in 1994. African Americans and other players of color were excluded from the National League by the late 1880s. They formed their own Negro Leagues that flourished until just after the Second World War when Jackie Robinson broke the NL color line (1947).
These leagues built their teams in a belt of Eastern cities that would reach only as far west as Pittsburgh, Chicago and St Louis. Not until after the Second World War were the further Midwest, West and, much later, the South included in major league expansion. The move in 1958 of two of New York’s three teams, the Giants (NL) to San Francisco and especially the Brooklyn Dodgers (NL) to Los Angeles, signified and cemented the rise of the West and demise of the East in the American consciousness.
The names and performances of baseball players, divided between pitchers and all other players, and the statistical measures that allow decontextualized comparisons over a span of a century resound through the game’s history as embodiments of its personality.
There were the early pitching stars: Cy Young, who won the most games and after whom the award for the best pitcher is named; Christy Mathewson, the handsome gentleman of the New York Giants (NL); Grover Cleveland Alexander, the crusty left-handed competitor; Walter Johnson, the fire-balling stalwart of the largely losing team, the Washington Senators (Alabama); and Lefty Grove of the Philadelphia Athletics, the man who got stronger as the game went on. But it is the hitters who most captured the adulation of the public: Tyrus (Ty) Raymond Cobb, the battler of the Detroit Tigers (AL); Lou Gehrig, the iron man and “Joltin’ Joe” DiMaggio, the elegant center fielder who married Marilyn Monroe (both of the New York Yankees); and Ted Williams, the “Splendid Splinter” of the Boston Red Sox whose prodigious talents have made him into the god of hitting. All are, however, dwarfed by the giant shadow of George Herman “Babe” Ruth, whose name has entered the language as an adjective for outsized. His accomplishments changed the game into one based on the home run or long ball, resulting in a sudden score with one swing of the bat, instead of a slower game. Yankee Stadium, opened in 1923 in the Bronx, New York, became known as the “house that Ruth built,” the most venerable of baseball’s venues.
In the 1950s, baseball entered a golden age, with powerful new hitters like the great center-fielders Mickey Mantle of the New York Yankees and Willie Mays of the New York/San Francisco Giants, who redefined the dichotomy of speed or power, leading the way for the modern superstar who combined both traits. The spread of the major leagues also led to a new kind of baseball stadium as an alternative to the ballpark, which was often outside the central city, surrounded by parking lots and not reachable by public transportation. Still, major-league baseball had purposely resisted innovations almost since the time of Babe Ruth. Segregated games were played only during the daytime into the mid-1930s (the technology for playing at night predated the First World War and was used to great effect in the Negro Leagues), shunning television broadcasts or convenient starting times, tying players to one team through the reserve clause system in a restraint of trade sanctioned by US congressional legislation, and its concomitant “farm” system of minor leagues, which, as the term implies, recreated a serf-like connection to one “organization.” Add to that the resistance to the expansion of the two eight-team leagues in the face of large population growth. These were all more or less conscious attempts to keep the game “pure,” and together helped to push the game into crisis by the early 1960s.
African American and Latino players, such as Roberto Clemente, helped to end the mindless control of tradition and revive flagging interest in baseball. Not all teams were integrated until 1958 and 1959 when Philadelphia and then Boston, two mediocre and rabidly racist organizations, finally and reluctantly accepted their first players of color.
Curt Flood, of the St. Louis Cardinals, forced the end of the reserve clause system by filing suit to void his trade to the inhospitable Philadelphia team, which helped lead to the skyrocketing of salaries through the ability to be released from unfair contracts. Teams like the Cincinnati Reds, “the Big Red Machine,” the Oakland Athletics and the Baltimore Red Sox wrested the title from the traditional and perennial world-series champions, the New York Yankees, in the 1960s and 1970s. The number of teams expanded exponentially, almost doubling between 1960 and the end of the century leading to the realignment of teams into divisions and the introduction of a playoff system. Increasing labor and management troubles have attended the growth in prosperity and renewed popularity of the game, with several work stoppages and a major strike in 1994–5. But further innovations, inter-league play and the explosion of home-run hitting in the late 1990s, led by Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Ken Griffey Jr, have eclipsed some of the marks set by Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron, and restored baseball to its central role in the popular imagination.
Industry:Culture
Time Inc. began in 1922 with its namesake magazine; in the same year Warner Bros, a film company, opened its first studio. These two companies merged in 1989 forming the world’s largest and most diversified entertainment conglomerate that exerts an amazing amount of control in the film, publishing, television and recording industries. In 1995 Time Warner bought TBS, becoming the most important force in cable broadcasting.
Today, Time Inc. is still the premier magazine publisher with twenty-four publications— Time, Sports Illustrated, People and many others; the book division includes Warner Books, Little, Brown and Co., as well as Book of the Month Club. The Warner Music Group is the most diversified music entertainment company; Warner Bros’ film entertainment unit produces TV shows such as Friends and ER (both NBC, 1994–), as well as operating the WB network. This conglomerate also includes HBO, Cinemax and Time Warner Cable, the second-largest owner and operator of cable systems.
Industry:Culture
Twin cities at the head of the Mississippi River (combined metropolitan population (1998) of 2,831,234). Founded in the early nineteenth century, they have become centers for progressive arts, music and education as well as economics and politics in the upper Plains. St. Paul, an industrial/commercial center, is the state capital. Minneapolis is known for the University of Minnesota, progressive politics and its extensive urban lakes and parks. Active professional sports include football (the Minnesota Vikings), baseball (Twins) and basketball (Timberwolves), as well as winter activities. Nearby, in Bloomington rises the Mall of America, projected to expand to 10 million square feet.
Industry:Culture
Since early cinema, the power to present marvelous effects and visions of societies in future time and distant space has made film a choice medium for science fiction. While these possibilities often have been realized as serializations of war/adventure dramas with rockets and exotic creatures (like the 1930s Buck Rogers), science-fiction cinema also has envisioned society and its possibilities through prisms of horror, philosophy and fantasy—the power of Blade Runner (1982) or Alien Nation (1988). At the end of the century computers and related technologies have revitalized epic science-fiction filmmaking at the same time that they have become the subjects of ominous speculation (The Matrix, 1999).
Postwar science fiction reflects many images and concerns of the Cold War. It shows a continuing fascination with new technology and its impacts—whether in George Pal’s Destination Moon (1950) or the more ominous Forbidden Planet (1956). Yet technology also had an edge, disrupting the natural order in the creation of monstrous ants (Them!, 1954), spiders, shrews and even women (Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, 1958). Especially chilling were situations in which technological advances combined with extra-terrestrial control, whether aimed at world conquest (The Thing, 1951, remade 1982; Invaders from Mars, 1953; Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1956) or world peace (The Day the Earth Stood Still, 1951). These films evoke concerns with the speed and motives of scientific changes, especially nuclear energy, and the scientist, who often ends fighting some heroic heterosexual couple who restore order.
Science fiction remained a genre to meditate on the present and future throughout the 1960s, as evidenced in Stanley Kubrick’s very different visions of the future in the antinuclear war Dr Strangelove (1964), the spaceship meditations of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and the alternative society of Clockwork Orange (1971). Indeed, moral dimensions of science-fiction arguments rather than science itself also pervade more popular series like those that envisioned humans replaced and enslaved by apes (Planet of the Apes, 1968 and sequels). These movies also drew on important authors like Arthur C. Clarke and Anthony Burgess. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 was also transformed into a movie by French director François Truffaut.
Science fiction began to experience a rebirth in the late 1970s through George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, who produced blockbuster combinations of visionary plots, human engagements with the limits of their possibilities on Earth, and off it, and fantastic special effects. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Spielberg, 1977), Star Wars and sequels (Lucas, beginning 1977) and E.T. (Spielberg, 1982) changed the ways in which moviegoers saw the future, and underpinned a renaissance of sciencefiction movies for the decades that followed.
Despite technological inventiveness and exotic characters, however, many sciencefiction movies replicate stereotypic themes of gender, race and American idealism, and coincide with wellestablished genres and scenarios of Hollywood. There remains a strong, sometimes xenophobic relationship with horror films, suggesting that what’s out there will hurt us. Masculine heroism, teamwork and democratic ideals also underpin the action of Total Recall (1990) and the Star Trek series. Hence, dreams, fears and memories meet on the sci-fi screen for spectators in the US and the world.
Industry:Culture
